From Undark Magazine:
During 2025’s New York Comic Con, Jim Lee — the president, publisher, and chief creative officer of DC Comics — spoke out against the use of artificial intelligence in the creation of the imprint’s comic books. “DC Comics will not support AI-generated storytelling or artwork. Not now. Not ever — as long as Anne DePies and I are in charge,” Lee said, punctuating his remarks with a concise observation: “AI doesn’t dream. It doesn’t feel. It doesn’t make art — it aggregates it.”
To many, Lee’s comments are worthy of praise — a leader of a revered institution taking a firm position against AI. Stands like his arise from AI’s negative impacts — especially those of generative AI — on actors, writers, and others in creative industries. Analogous concerns have arisen where health, justice, and education are concerned.
Many thoughtful voices in politics and culture are calling for controls on AI to protect the rights of those it impacts, be they artists, patients, renters, or defendants. Much of this has been captured in a modern movement labeled “AI Luddite.” Like the original Luddites of the 1800s, these AI Luddites are not so much anti-tech as pro-human. They demand that technology reinforce human creativity and the dignity of work, rather than replacing skilled workers with an unskilled precariat, or replacing them altogether with machines. They want technology to be a choice made by those who use it and those it affects, rather than being forced on them.
More here.
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In 1894, a German archaeologist named Herr G Heim made a groundbreaking discovery. On the island of Cyprus, he excavated a tomb that belonged to a hitherto unknown ancient female poet by the name of Bilitis. Carved on the walls surrounding her sarcophagus were more than 150 ancient Greek poems in which Bilitis recounted her life, from her childhood in Pamphylia in present-day Turkey to her adventures on the islands of Lesbos and Cyprus, where she would eventually come to rest. Heim diligently copied down this treasure trove of poems, which had not seen the light of day for more than two millennia. They would have remained little known – accessible only to a small, scholarly audience who could decipher ancient Greek – had a Frenchman named Pierre Louÿs not taken it upon himself to hunt down Heim’s Greek edition, hot off the press, and translated Bilitis’s poetry into French for a broader reading public that same year (published as Les Chansons de Bilitis or The Songs of Bilitis). Bilitis might have been an obscure historical figure – no other ancient author mentions encountering her or her poetry – but the cultural and literary significance of Heim’s discovery was not lost on Louÿs. For, in several of her poems, Bilitis revealed that she crossed paths with classical antiquity’s most renowned and controversial female poet: Sappho.
Varouxakis’s book is primarily about Westerners’ own conception of the West — an approach that allows him to prove that even within the so-called West, the notion was not a coherent container. It is as much a history of terms and discourses as it is about ideas, and it starts the historical clock on those terms pointedly late. Most historians trace the concept of the West back to Herodotus in the fifth century BC, when the “western” Greeks fought the “eastern” Persians. In fact, Varouxakis writes, “‘The West’ as a potential political entity based on civilisational commonality is a modern idea that arose in the first half of the nineteenth century.”
Many of us experience a 
My husband and I, newlyweds of just one year, live an ordinary life. We drag each other to Costco on Saturdays, jointly complain about how much we hate a specific restaurant on the Delmar Loop, and endlessly debate the China and America relationship. Yes, he walks through the world with the undeniable privileges of a White American man. And yes, his “expert” insights into China often leave me caught between a laugh and a heavy sigh.
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“The relation between the chauffeur and the chauffeured can be curiously intense,” Iris Murdoch wrote in “The Sea, the Sea.” This was true in David Szalay’s Booker Prize-winning novel “Flesh” (2025) and it is also true in Daniyal Mueenuddin’s sensitive and powerful first novel, “This Is Where the Serpent Lives,” set largely in rural Pakistan.
In recent years, scientists have begun to use magic effects to investigate the blind spots in our attention and perception [G. Kuhn, Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic (2019); S. Macknik, S. Martinez-Conde, S. Blakeslee, Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions (2010)]. Recently, we suggested that similar techniques could be transferred to nonhuman animal observers and that such an endeavor would provide insight into the inherent commonalities and discrepancies in attention and perception in human and nonhuman animals [E. Garcia-Pelegrin, A. K. Schnell, C. Wilkins, N. S. Clayton, Science 369, 1424–1426 (2020)]. Here, we performed three different magic effects (palming, French drop, and fast pass) to a sample of six Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius). These magic effects were specifically chosen as they utilize different cues and expectations that mislead the spectator into thinking one object has or has not been transferred from one hand to the other.
A squad of amateur fascists feast around a table at a busy restaurant, their eyes flicking from their meal toward a crowd across the room, and then to their de facto leader, a balding 35-year-old newspaper man. They practically hover above their chairs, panting, licking their lips, gripping their glasses of wine instead of drinking from them: they are poised for something else, and so they check in again with their boss, whose curt nod gives them assent to take action. They leap up, bludgeon the other men with batons and kick them repeatedly; a few days later, they perform a similar attack on the headquarters of the socialist newspaper L’Avanti, smashing their equipment, stabbing their workers, lighting people and things on fire. The year is 1919 and the man who leads the squadrismo is Benito Mussolini.